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Introspector Clouzot

July 15, 2010

In the magazine this week, Anthony Lane reviews “Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno” (opening tomorrow at IFC Center), a documentary presentation by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea of footage from Clouzot’s unfinished 1964 feature and an investigation, by way of interviews with crew members, of why it wasn’t finished. Clouzot’s story concerns Marcel (Serge Reggiani), a hotelier in a small provincial town whose love for his young wife, Odette (Romy Schneider), devolves to jealousy. As Anthony writes,

Fear of cuckoldry starts to play havoc with his brain. The soundtrack is littered with clicks, repeats, and nonsense chatter, like a sort of involuntary hip-hop, while the screen pullulates with abstract shapes and color-crazes—a lake turning blood-crimson, say, while Odette water-skis across it, behind a boat whose pilot she may, or may not, have coupled with.

The story of what kept Clouzot from seeing the project through doesn’t quite come out verbatim in the documentary; it’s a tale the import of which cuts deep in the history of cinema and reflects the era’s aesthetic revolutions, of which Ground Zero was France.

The footage that Clouzot left behind falls into two main categories—test footage and rushes from the shoot. Clouzot spent a long time with visual artists and a camera crew to come up with cinematic evocations of erotic obsession—Anthony describes “some glistening, erotically maddened images of Schneider, licking her lips under playful lights, writhing naked before an onrushing train, or smoking in reverse, sucking the cloud back in”; there’s also some material involving kaleidoscopic fragmenting of images, luridly colorful reflections off a cellophane veil, vertiginously alluring abstractions, and even a Slinky making its way down Schneider’s body. Then there are the rushes—some of which involve the realization, on location, of some of these hallucinatory effects, but most of which are dramatic scenes from a marriage, involving Marcel’s increasingly frenzied espionage of his wife as she cavorts, innocently or not, with others, and his confrontations with her over them.

Yet one of the most surprising things to learn from the interviews (including with Costa-Gavras, who was his assistant at the time, and the late William Lubtchansky, the great cinematographer who was then a young camera assistant) is that Clouzot’s production ran aground because of the director’s obsessive filming and refilming, in defiance of all external deadlines, of the film’s narrative, dramatic elements. In other words, it wasn’t the exacting color tricks (featuring elaborate makeup and costuming) or other effects—the elements that most obviously distinguished this shoot from all other shoots—that cost him the film, but rather his own fanatical perfectionism regarding shots that were no different in technique from the norm. What was troubling him?

Costa-Gavras explains that Clouzot had seen Fellini’s “8 1/2” and that, under its influence, he was prompted to experiment with image and sound in order to capture states of mind on film. (Much of what he accomplished with these tests comes off as a modern-day take on such Surrealist-inspired French avant-garde films of the nineteen-twenties as “Emak-Bakia” or “Ballet Mécanique.”) But the real revolution that had taken place in the cinema, and, especially, in the French cinema—the New Wave, which had little use for Clouzot and his films—had little to do with the subjectivism of Fellini’s dream-worlds. On the contrary, the young generation of French filmmakers, inspired by Hollywood, sought to evoke psychological depths by means of gesture, dialogue, and visual composition; and this, above all, is what Clouzot worried about. (As one interviewee says, Clouzot even brought in one of the camera operators from Dreyer’s 1927 “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” a technician who became known, on the set, as “Mr. Framed-to-the-Millimeter.”) In the literal sense, it was Clouzot’s heart attack, toward the end of the location shoot, that put an end to the production; it was the departure of Reggiani, following conflicts with the director (in part, over the director’s demands for retakes), that had already left the production reeling; but it was Clouzot’s struggle with mere cinematic representation that drove the production over the edge. In effect, Clouzot was working to play catch-up with two trends, one of which he mastered through sheer technical savvy, but the other of which eluded it utterly because he was out of touch with its spirit.

Digging around in a book about Maupassant this morning (thinking about literary realism), I found a line from the French nineteenth-century philosopher Ernest Renan that seems to sum up Clouzot’s problem: “Complexity is anterior to simplicity.” The directors who had, in effect, taken over the French cinematic imagination at that time relied on simple means to express their complex thoughts. Clouzot was relying on complex images to convey relatively simple thoughts, and his relentless pressure to extract more meaning and more power from the simpler images in his repertoire suggested that he was well aware of the current he was straining against.